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Magnus Granberg
Trouble, Had It All My Days
Magnus Granberg
Featuring: Magnus Granberg Skogen
Available soon
Trouble, Had It All My Days (2025) 61:23
Skogen
Heather Roche, clarinet Angharad Davies, violin Anna Lindal, violin
Eva Lindal, violin Leo Svensson Sander, cello Simon Allen, vibraphone
Finn Loxbo, acoustic steel string guitar Stina Hellberg Agback, harp
Magnus Granberg prepared piano Erik Carlsson percussion
Henrik Olsson objects, contact microphones, thumb piano
Petter Wästberg contact microphone, mixing board, loudspeaker
Toshimaru Nakamura no-input mixing board
Recorded by Niclas Lindström and Calle Gustavsson at Atlantis, Stockholm, November 27 2025.
Mixed and mastered by Anders Dahl.
Cover artwork, ’Gendalen’, by Magnus Gramén, with thanks.
Interview with Magnus Granberg
I'm happy that you enjoyed the concert; it was really a pleasure performing at Music We’d Like to Hear in London last autumn. For us it was quite a special event in that it marked our twentieth anniversary as an ensemble. As well as the concert in London we also performed at Konserthuset in Stockholm in a concert produced by John Chantler and Edition Festival, in-between the two performances we also had the chance to record the piece at Atlantis in Stockholm.
I guess that, as so often, you started from some existing musical fragments, which you transformed in the process of composition. Can you tell us what the original pieces were, and why you chose them?
The piece takes an aria by Bach (”Seufzer, Tränen, ängstlich sehnen” from the cantata BWV 21, ”Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis”) as its point of departure, and the reason for choosing this particular piece was quite simply that I had already written some raw materials based on this aria for director Karl Dunér’s staging of two Greek tragedies (”The Persians” by Aeschylus and ”The Trojan Women” by Euripides) at the Royal Dramatic Theatre here in Stockholm, which we for various reasons chose to abandon at the time. So, after the premiere of the production I just thought I’d revisit these materials and try to do something with them, which in the end resulted in this piece for Skogen as well as a string quartet and a solo piece for American trumpet player Nate Wooley. As for the title, ”Trouble, Had It All My Days”, it is actually derived from the lyrics of a song by American blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt, which also happens to allude to the title of the previously mentioned Bach cantata, ”Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss”, which translates as something like ”I had many troubles”.
One of the reasons that I found the concert so magical was simply the size of the ensemble. While the music remained typically restrained (for the most part, at least), it was just such a pleasure to see so many musicians co-operating in the production of this bizarre and unique soundworld.
Yes, I had this simple and rather obvious idea of celebrating our anniversary by inviting as many of our members and previous collaborators (as well as one new member, Heather Roche) as our budget would possibly allow us, so we ended up being thirteen musicians in Stockholm and even fourteen in London, where we had the great pleasure of rejoining our dear friend Rhodri Davies. And I’m really happy to hear that you enjoyed hearing the sound of this large community of people making music together, I found it very rewarding myself just getting to be a part of this environment, experiencing how the music was taking shape during the performances.
